The Witcher season 3 download (opens in new tab) will be Henry Cavill’s last hurrah on the show, and it makes us sad. But at least he’s going out in style, according to showrunner Lauren Hissrich, who told Entertainment Weekly (opens in new tab) that the upcoming season will give him a fitting “heroic farewell”.
“Henry has given so much to the show and so we want to honor that appropriately,” said Hissrich. The third season wasn’t specifically written as a farewell to Cavill, but Hissrich said the material the season is based on: Time of Contempt (opens in new tab)author Andrzej Sapkowski’s second full-length novel and fourth Witcher book, is sort of a natural fit for the task.
“What’s so interesting is that season three to me is the closest thing we’ve done as a one-to-one adaptation of the books,” Hissrich said. “Obviously we can’t do every page, but Time of Contempt has given us so many big action events, plot points, defining character moments, huge revelations of a great evil. There’s so much to do that we were able to stay real, very close to the books.
“Geralt’s big turn is about giving up neutrality and doing whatever he has to do to get to Ciri. And to me, it’s the most heroic sendoff we can have, even if it’s not written to be. Geralt has a new mission in mind when we return to him in Season 4. He’s a slightly different Geralt than we expected, which is an understatement, by the way.”
Cavill announced in early November that he would be leaving The Witcher after its third season to be replaced by Liam Hemsworth. (opens in new tab), brother of Thor actor Chris. With all due respect to Liam, the news saddened pretty much everyone, including us (opens in new tab). It was widely believed that Cavill’s departure was related to his understandable pursuit of the Superman role in films, which he announced he would be returning to (opens in new tab) in October.
But then he was hosed down: After a cameo appearance at the end of Black Adam, new DC movie boss James Gunn decided he wanted to start over, and Henry — and pretty much everyone else involved in the previous movies — was gone. (opens in new tab).
Of course, some fans hoped that losing the Superman performance would open the door for Cavill’s return as Geralt, but Hissrich said that hasn’t even been considered at this point. “We have plans for this to continue in various permutations,” she said. “I love the mothership, I’m sticking with it, but obviously Blood Origin is coming out. I hope this doesn’t stop for a while. So I think the possibilities are endless, and we’ll see what happens.”
The good news for Cavill is that even with The Witcher and Superman off his plate, he still has a lot to do: Amazon and Games Workshop announced last week that he’s been tapped to produce and star, as news writer Mollie Taylor put it . , “an entire cinematic universe”, based on Warhammer 40,000 (opens in new tab). He is a known fan of the series, to the extent that Creative Assembly added him to Total War: Warhammer 2 (opens in new tab) in the 2020 DLC The Warden and The Bunch.
